Table of Contents

Background

WhatsApp, since its launch in 2009, has grown exponentially and is the most popular private messaging app. In 2018, WhatsApp introduced WhatsApp Business with the aim to enable owners of small businesses to personally connect with customers throughout their shopping experience.

WhatsApp has lately been expanding its payments business in India. Also, its not uncommon for us to deal with our local stores through WhatsApp. The current version doesn’t fit well in the Indian Demographic. The whole communication is manual and needs constant attention from the shop owner until the time the purchase is made. Features like catalogs, are tedious to use because of large and variable number of items and lack of micromanagement of inventory in local stores.

<aside> 📌 We want to describe the customer-local store interaction in offline(going to store for purchase) as well as online environment(ordering through WhatsApp, calls, etc) and evaluate how local store owners integrates the current version of WhatsApp Business to aid online ordering process. We will be using generative and evaluative research techniques to explore the journey users take, both inside and outside of our platform i.e. WhatsApp, when they decide to purchase from local stores, in order to better understand the challenges and needs they face in these circumstances.

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Objectives

The primary objectives of our research study are:

Research Success Criteria